The last element of any meter is always marked as long in schemas. – marks a long syllable, ⏑ marks a short syllable and x marks a syllaba anceps meaning that it can be either long or short. But for one simple and popular meter, the Phalaecian Hendecasyllable, the schema is shown for illustration purposes: x x – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ – ⏑ – – There are various Latin meters (the Hypotactic corpus counts 273 meters, of which only 40 occur in more than 50 lines and only 13 occur in more than 500 lines) and this is not the place for a detailed summary of them. For example, “eorum” while usually having three syllables (e-o-rum) can be read as eo-rum. However, sometimes the two syllables are blended into one which is then long by nature of containing a diphthong. If inside of a word, one syllable ends with a vowel end next begins with a vowel, the first vowel is usually short (in Latin: vocalis ante vocalem corripitur). For example, “pressa est“ is read as “pressast”. “est” or “estis”, the first syllable of the form of “esse” is elided instead of the last syllable of the first word. If the above situation occurs, but the second word is a certain form of the auxiliary “esse” (“to be”), e.g. If the elision is not actually carried out, this is called a hiat. For example, in “quare habe” the second syllable of “quare” is elided resulting in the reading “quar(h)abe”. If one word ends with a vowel or an “m” (which is only nasalized) and the succeeding word begins with a vowel or an “h” (which is only an aspiration mark), the last syllable of the first word is elided. For example, the second syllable of “volucris” (“bird”) can be considered long or short. If a syllable can be considered long by position but the causing consonant cluster consists only of a muta (b, d, g, p, t, k) followed by a liquida (l, r), it may indeed be considered long by position, but more often the lengthening does not occur. However, as is often the case with language, a number of phenomena can occur that change the way the text is read impacting also the scanning of the line: In this case, the syllable is considered to be long “by position.”Īll other syllables are considered short.
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